Call Google the gangsta of online retail, the big G, but don't underestimate its power over e-commerce players. At eTail West in Palm Springs this morning, an entire pre-conference summit was devoted to "Search and Display," and it brought to light the good cop/bad cop role of Google in their businesses.

It is a technology company, so theoretically the revenue-making initiatives of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) shouldn't really impact retailers who are doing their own marketing to drive online business. Wrong. So wrong. Google revamped its product listing ads last May, turning them from free to paid, in a move that advertisers freaked out about initially, but now those who have used them reportedly consider it a big hit . In the fall it updated Google Penguin which forced brands to crack down and disavow bogus Web links to their sites, which created complications.

Steph Leffler, chief executive officer and co-founder of CrowdSouce, a startup in the St. Louis area that has created a network of 50,000 at-home workers who do tasks for retailers that range from writing a product description to moderating user-generated content, said the product descriptions were what tripped up many retailers when it came to getting Google traffic.

"Product descriptions by manufacturers were being used by multiple retailers and it actually hurt retailers because they got filtered out in search rankings," Leffler tells me. "If Google had three pages from different retailers that they thought were the same, they'd filter two of them."

It's hard to determine who gets filtered out and why, but it used to be that it would be most of their trusted sites. Today there are tags where you can put tags and take ownership of the descriptions, and that helps with the problem, she says.

Why does Google matter so much?

Rahman Coupe, chief executive officer of YourAmigo, shared data that showed 15 percent of new visitors to the site are branded, meaning they generated from the brand's own efforts, but 65 percent are non-branded, meaning they land on a retailer's site from the wild and wooly land of search engines, primarily Google. In other words, if you want new customers, you need to be able to play with Google. Based on Google data, 20 percent of searches every day are new or haven't been completed in the past six months.

Those product listing ads accounted for 17 percent of total Google search spend in the fourth quarter of 2012, and 10.7 percent of search engine market overall, Coupe said.

During the panel session, Jeff McRitchie, vice president of marketing for Mybinding.com, said Google's crackdown on bad links have led to "less spam and less advertorials" from bogus links.

"I do think most people have cleaned up their acts," he said. "It's pushing us to do better marketing overall. It's pushing us to do real marketing."

So that's what you might say is Google's good cop role. But like other retailers, he worries about other changes down the road.

"I'm afraid that Google's going to change the rules again, and everything's going to change and things that I did 10 years ago [are] going to come back to bite me," he said. And that would be bad cop.

After getting an MA in journalism from Syracuse University, Teresa worked as a general assignment newspaper reporter—general on purpose because besides the usual city hall and police articles, there was the chance to fly an F-18 with the Blue Angels and tag along with bounty hunters on a stakeout—all good preparation for covering entrepreneurs.

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